Shadowing Practice: 2025 DevOps, SRE, Cloud Engineer Interview Questions: Ace Your Interview with This Guide - Learn English Speaking with Video
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Hey, what's up everybody?
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My name is Moss, and this is the DevOps interview guide.
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In this video, I'm going to outline at a high level the typical structure of a DevOps interview
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and provide some advice on how you can prepare for your next interview.
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I'm a DevOps engineer with about eight years of experience, and I can tell you I've been in a lot of interviews,
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And the interviews that I'm going to be focused on in this video are targeting experienced or intermediate level DevOps engineering positions.
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And I'd like to point out that typically the title of a DevOps engineering role is called a DevOps engineer.
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But that isn't the case for all companies, especially larger companies like Meta, Amazon, Google, etc. For example,
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at Meta, the role that does a lot of DevOps activities is called a production engineer.
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At Google, I'm pretty sure they're referred to as developer productivity software engineers.
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And at Amazon Web Services, they're referred to as system development engineers.
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Now let's briefly talk about the events leading up to an interview.
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The first step for a DevOps engineering interview is typically a pre-screening call with the recruiter for that particular role.
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And in that pre-screening call, the recruiter asks you about your experience,
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asks you what you're looking for in terms of a job and also your salary expectations probably,
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and will probably be able to give you some high-level information about the role.
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If the recruiter thinks you're a good fit, then they'll forward your information on to the hiring manager, and then the hiring manager will decide whether to move forward with an interview or not.
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Now, sometimes before your information is forwarded to the hiring manager, if the recruiter still thinks you're a good fit, you might be pre-screened with an online assessment.
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So following the pre-screening call, the recruiter will typically send you a link to some sort of online assessment.
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And that online assessment will typically include either a coding challenge or it will include general DevOps-related questions.
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Those questions could include specifics about DevOps practices or tooling and technologies within DevOps.
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If you pass the online assessment, the hiring manager will likely set up an interview with you.
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So let's talk a little bit about the structure of an interview.
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The length of an interview can vary depending on the company.
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So at bigger companies like Meta and Amazon, the interview is typically five separate sessions with different interviewers,
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and it can be up to six hours in total.
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At smaller companies, you'll find that the interview is typically one or two sessions, totaling either one or two hours.
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The typical format of an interview will include the following three sections.
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The first section are STAR-based interview questions.
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STAR stands for Situation, Task, Action, and Result.
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And these are behavioral questions.
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The second part of the interview are coding challenges.
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And in the final section of the interview, they typically ask experience-based DevOps questions on tooling technologies or concepts.
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And I want to emphasize that the order
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that I've laid them out here is not necessarily the order that you'll get in all of your interviews.
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So let's dive deeper into each section to analyze what's included.
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So let's begin with the star interview questions.
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So these questions can be either hypothetical scenarios or they can be drawn from your personal experience.
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And this depends on the company.
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So for instance, Amazon, like AWS,
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they'll ask these star questions in the format as, tell me about a time when this happened.
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So for instance, they'll say, tell me about a time that you had a disagreement with a coworker.
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Whereas other companies might phrase the question as, what would you do in this particular situation?
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So what would you do if you had a disagreement with your coworker?
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So STAR-based questions are behavioral questions.
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And as I mentioned before, STAR stands for Situation, Task, Action, and Result.
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and those represent the steps you need to take in order to answer the question.
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So to answer one of these questions, you should outline the situation.
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You should specify the tasks that needed to be done.
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Third, you should tell the interviewer what your actions were in that situation.
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And finally, you should tell the interviewer what the results of your actions were in that situation.
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So my advice for answering these types of questions is to be prepared before the interview.
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Come up with real examples from your past experience that answer various questions.
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And what you can do is you can Google star interview questions,
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and you can get a large list of these star interview questions.
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and you want to craft the examples that you come up with from your past experience for specific questions.
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So for instance, the one that I gave earlier, tell me about a time that you had a disagreement with a coworker.
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You should come up with an example from your past experience that specifically addresses that question.
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And I also want to emphasize that the examples
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that you come up with should illustrate your actions that you took in this situation.
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Avoid saying we or we the team did such and such in this particular situation.
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Always focus on what you did and your contributions were to the situation.
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Additionally, the examples that you come up with should always end with measurable results.
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So for instance, you could give an example where the result was that build times were reduced by 20%,
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or that positive feedback from the development team increased for a particular process or workflow that you improved.
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Even if the example that you give results in a negative outcome,
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it's still a useful example because oftentimes interviewers will ask you something like,
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Tell me about a time that you failed to meet a project deadline or a project requirement.
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In these cases, you want to have those examples prepared because even though the example may have resulted in a negative outcome,
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the follow-up to that is, what did you learn?
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What would you have done differently?
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That's typically what they ask in those cases.
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Okay, so now that we've covered star interview questions, let's talk about the coding challenges that you might get when you're interviewing for a DevOps engineering role.
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So depending on the company, you might have a single coding challenge in your interview,
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or you might have multiple coding challenges in a single interview session or across multiple interview sessions.
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And at larger companies like Meta, Amazon, Google, you can expect to receive leak code style questions.
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But for DevOps engineering roles, the level of coding
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that is required to fulfill the roles responsibilities is not the
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same level as a software engineer working on back-end services for AWS or Meta.
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the software that DevOps engineers write is typically internal tooling
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that doesn't have a direct impact on the end user of services like Meta or AWS.
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And because of that, coding challenges in DevOps engineering roles typically are not as difficult as software development engineer roles.
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I've outlined in the presentation a list of categories that I've studied for interviews
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and that I have most commonly seen in interviews for DevOps engineering roles that you can study on leak code.
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And you can study these specific categories on leak code by just navigating to leak code.
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And then if you select problems here at the top,
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scroll down, you can see that the problems are categorized here.
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And if I expand this, I can select a particular category.
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Now a category that I see consistently in DevOps engineering roles are hash table questions.
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So if I open this up, I can see a list of hash table questions
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and they can be sorted by difficulty or frequency if you have a LeakCode Premium membership,
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which it is helpful to see the frequency that a question is asked, but you can sort by difficulty.
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And in general, the level of difficulty that you'll see in DevOps engineering roles is going to be easy and medium.
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I don't think I've ever seen a hard leak code question in a DevOps engineer interview.
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So this is the way that I've studied for coding challenges.
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I studied per category.
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I narrowed the categories down to the ones that I listed in the presentation.
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And then on top of that, there's this site, Grind 75 Questions.
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This also helps you narrow the number of questions that you want to study for by difficulty,
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by topic, and also by your schedule as well.
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So this was also very helpful and something that I utilized to study for my interviews.
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So a lot of times the coding challenges will be leak code style questions, but there is kind of a second format of questions that I've also seen,
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and these are formatted almost like a project.
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so you will be asked to complete unfinished code for instance
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or you'll be given some sort of feature or system to implement
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so it kind of is like a system design question
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but not really I don't think it's as intense as system design questions
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but it is more of an open-ended problem solving question
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and it's not specifically targeted to a single problem like you know find the shortest path
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or sort these numbers or something like that.
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I feel like this kind of question is less common.
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You're more likely to get LeakCode style questions but just know that this other format does pop up here and there.
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So my advice for the LeakCode challenges is first make sure that you're talking out your solution as you work it out.
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Make sure that you're talking about the things that you're doing and don't just silently write code because the interviewer doesn't, you know, can't read your thoughts and you need to make sure
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that you're expressing your thoughts while you're writing out the code.
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And this takes practice because it's not natural for someone to write out code and talk at the same time.
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But it is something that you have to get used to for the interviews
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because it's very helpful for both yourself and the interviewer because the interviewer may, you might be going in the wrong direction,
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and if you're expressing your thoughts, the interviewer can redirect you or guide you into a different direction if they know your thought process.
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The other thing that I would advise is to check in with your interviewer frequently
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and make sure that you're on the right path or that your approach makes sense.
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So in the beginning, when you feel like you've come up with an initial approach that you want to implement, run it by your interviewer and say,
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you know, I think I can solve this problem by doing, you know, such and so.
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And they can validate, you know, whether that approach makes sense or maybe they'll tell you, they aren't going to tell you outright that it's wrong,
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but they'll be able to kind of guide you into a different direction if you're not headed in the right direction.
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So check in as you're talking about the steps that you're taking, check in with the interviewer, ask them, Does this make sense?
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Get feedback from them and get input from them.
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The coding challenge isn't just about solving the problem.
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It's also about gauging how you work with others when you're approaching or trying to solve a technical problem.
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On the job, you're going to be working on a team and having to solve problems as a team.
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And so when you're working independently and working in silence and you're not communicating with the interviewer, I think that this does take points off from your interview.
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Also, I would not spend a lot of time in the beginning of the interview
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when they show you the problem statement thinking about the most optimal result.
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Try to get to work and start coding as soon as possible.
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Even if it's a suboptimal approach and you know it's a suboptimal approach, you can optimize later.
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But get a working solution first and then iterate because that will inevitably happen anyway if you come up with a solution.
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the interviewer is going to ask you, is there any way to optimize this solution?
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And finally, make sure that you're practicing the leak code questions that I mentioned earlier.
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Take a little bit of time each day to complete one or two problems.
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Don't try and cram problems all at once or memorize solutions.
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Look for patterns in problems.
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A lot of problems overlap in their solutions or they can be bucketed into a particular category.
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And I promise you, once you start doing, not even like that many problems, you'll start to see patterns in the problem statements,
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and you'll immediately recognize, oh, I can use a hash table for this particular problem, or I can use a stack for this particular problem.
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And it will help you a lot when you're presented with a coding challenge,
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because the coding challenges that you're given are not one-for-one for a leak code question.
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They'll never be one for one for a leak code question.
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They're always slightly tweaked.
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They're very close to a leak code question that you've seen before, but the constraints are tweaked, the input is tweaked, something is tweaked a little bit.
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So you just want to be able to recognize what kind of a problem it is,
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and that will help you come up with a viable approach to solving that problem.
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In the final section that I want to cover are experience-based questions.
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And this line of questioning is very specific to the role that you're applying for.
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It's kind of a toss-up on what kind of questions you're going to get in this section of the interview.
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You could be asked questions about Linux administration or troubleshooting, or you could be asked more general troubleshooting questions.
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For example, you might be given a hypothetical scenario where you are working on a client workstation,
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communicating with a server, and you receive an error from the server.
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They'll ask you, well, what does the error mean, and how would you go about fixing that error?
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And as you address each error, they'll introduce a new error.
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So it's kind of an exploratory troubleshooting session to see what the depth of your knowledge is and how broad it is,
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what kind of technologies and concepts does your knowledge base span?
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Because they'll go from networking troubleshooting errors to local errors that you might get on a Linux machine to storage errors.
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it will go into quite a bit of depth.
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Or you might be asked questions for a specific tool like Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform, Ansible, Jenkins, GitLab,
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or any other DevOps-related tool.
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In addition, you could be asked higher-level questions about DevOps concepts like GitOps or CICD.
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So for instance, you might be asked, how would you implement a CICD pipeline that utilizes GitOps?
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These are the kinds of questions that you can expect in the experience-based section of the interview.
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So in conclusion, my advice to you is to first study easy
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and medium-difficulty LeetCode questions in the categories that I outlined in the previous slide.
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Also prepare examples for star-based interview questions.
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And make sure to study tools and technologies
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that companies need candidates to have experience in for the role that you're applying for.
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If the job description specifies that they're looking for someone with Kubernetes experience or knowledge about Kubernetes, try to get some experience on your own,
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either at your current job or independently on your own time to get familiar with Kubernetes and get experience with Kubernetes.
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In general, the most common technologies that I've seen in job descriptions and have been asked about in interviews are Docker,
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Kubernetes, Linux, AWS, Azure, Python, and Terraform.
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Those seem to be trending quite a bit right now in DevOps interviews.
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And I'd also like to note that that list assumes
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that you already have exposure to the long list of other DevOps tools that you're kind of expected to have experience with,
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like Git, SEM tools like GitHub, GitLab, or Bitbucket, CICD tools like Jenkins or Travis CI.
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My other advice is to continue applying and interviewing for positions.
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Apply for as many jobs as you can and get as many interviews as you can because every time you interview,
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you'll gain a little bit of interview experience and you'll be more prepared for your next interview.
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And lastly, make sure that you have a list of questions that you want to ask the interviewer.
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Because if you're seriously considering a move into a new job, think about all of the things
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that are important to you in a job maybe things
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that you have in your current job that you aren't guaranteed in a new job.
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And some of the things that I typically look for in a DevOps engineering role
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and comes up quite a bit are on-call scheduling.
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So is there an on-call schedule?
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And if so, what kind of a schedule is it?
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Because it could be a 24-7 schedule or it could be something that's not as demanding where it's only during business hours,
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but it could have weekends.
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So you want to make sure that you ask all of the questions
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and reveal any aspects of the job that might make you hesitant to take the job if you were given an offer.
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I hope this video helped and I've linked some resources in the video description below.
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If you did find this video valuable, please consider throwing a like on the video and subscribing to the channel for more videos like this.
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Vocabulario y notas de pronunciación para esta lección
Esta lección de conversación de nivel C1 se basa en el vídeo “2025 DevOps, SRE, Cloud Engineer Interview Questions: Ace Your Interview with This Guide”. Las palabras que más se repiten: interview, Devops, role, experience, interviewer. Este vídeo tiene 198 frases y 2999 palabras para practicar shadowing. La parte hablada dura 19:23. El hablante habla a un ritmo natural de unas 155 palabras por minuto, cercano a una conversación cotidiana. El 83 % de las palabras está entre las 3.000 más comunes del inglés; conviene repasar el resto antes de empezar.
Vocabulario clave de este vídeo
Las 15 palabras más avanzadas del vídeo, con su pronunciación y significado:
| Palabra | Pronunciación | Significado |
|---|---|---|
| interviewer sustantivo | /ˈɪntɚvjuɚ/ | entrevistador, entrevistadora |
| leak sustantivo | /liːk/ | gotera, agujero |
| recruit verbo | /ɹɪˈkɹut/ | reclutar |
| troubleshooting sustantivo | hallazgo de soluciones, identificación de problemas | |
| tweak sustantivo | /twiːk/ | retoque |
| outline sustantivo | /ˈaʊtlaɪn/ | contorno |
| hash sustantivo | /ˈhæʃ/ | picadillo, guiso |
| disagreement sustantivo | /dɪsəˈɡɹiːmənt/ | desavenencia, desacuerdo |
| optimize verbo | /ˈɑptɪmaɪz/ | optimizar |
| suboptimal adjetivo | /sʌbˈɑptɪməl/ | subóptimo |
| hypothetical adjetivo | /ˌhaɪpəˈθɛtɪkəl/ | hipotético |
| emphasize verbo | /ˈɛm.fə.saɪz/ | enfatizar, hacer hincapié |
| specify verbo | /ˈspɛs.əˌfaɪ/ | especificar, circunstanciar |
| behavioral adjetivo | /bɪˈheɪvjəɹəl/ | del comportamiento, conductual |
| independently adverbio | /ˌɪndɪˈpɛndəntli/ | independientemente |
Phrasal verbs que vas a escuchar
| Palabra | Significado |
|---|---|
| come up with verbo | ingeniar, ingeniarse |
| come up verbo | salir a relucir |
| point out verbo | señalar, apuntar |
| pop up verbo | aparecerse |
Gramática en este vídeo
Las estructuras que más usa el hablante, con las palabras exactas del vídeo:
| Estructura | En el vídeo |
|---|---|
| Present perfect have/has + participio pasado — una acción pasada que sigue importando ahora | I've been · I've laid · have done |
| Voz pasiva be + participio pasado — importa lo que ocurre, no quién lo hace | be focused · is called · is forwarded |
Pronunciación a tener en cuenta
El hablante usa 78 contracciones y formas reducidas, como you're, I've, they'll. Dilas en su forma corta, tal como las oyes.
- Los sonidos de “sh” y “zh”: hash /ˈhæʃ/, measurable /ˈmɛʒəɹəbəl/, workstation /ˈwɝkˌsteɪʃən/, unfinished /ʌnˈfɪnɪʃt/, expectation /ˌɛk.spɛkˈteɪ.ʃən/
- Palabras largas — cuida el acento: disagreement /dɪsəˈɡɹiːmənt/, suboptimal /sʌbˈɑptɪməl/, hypothetical /ˌhaɪpəˈθɛtɪkəl/, behavioral /bɪˈheɪvjəɹəl/, independently /ˌɪndɪˈpɛndəntli/
Cómo practicar con este vídeo
- Escucha el vídeo entero una vez sin hablar y anota las palabras que no conoces.
- Empieza a velocidad 0,75×, haz shadowing frase por frase y vuelve a la velocidad normal cuando te resulte fácil.
- Grábate y compara con el original, prestando atención a palabras como interviewer, leak, recruit.
¿Qué es la Técnica de Shadowing?
Shadowing es una técnica de aprendizaje de idiomas respaldada por la ciencia, desarrollada originalmente para la formación de intérpretes profesionales y popularizada por el políglota Dr. Alexander Arguelles. El método es simple pero poderoso: escuchas audio en inglés nativo y lo repites en voz alta de inmediato, como una sombra que sigue al hablante con solo 1-2 segundos de retraso. A diferencia de la escucha pasiva o los ejercicios de gramática, el shadowing obliga a tu cerebro y músculos de la boca a procesar y reproducir simultáneamente patrones de habla reales. Las investigaciones muestran que mejora significativamente la precisión de la pronunciación, la entonación, el ritmo, el habla conectada, la comprensión auditiva y la fluidez al hablar, convirtiéndola en una de las metodologías más efectivas para la preparación del IELTS Speaking y la comunicación en inglés en el mundo real.